Hi, is there an upgrade price if I own blocs 3.5.x?
I donāt know about v3, but there is an upgrade from v4 for both Blocs and BlocsPlus.
Bear in mind that the Blocs5 price is a one off and not a yearly subscription.
1 Like
Blocs looks great ā a bit like RW/Stacks might have looked if Skyler Knight had designed it. I love the idea of graphics features like gradients and masks built in to the app. But Iād be interested to hear what itās like to work with, and how easy it is to break out of the Blocs aesthetic. For me, it underlines why it is pointless for RW/Stacks to take on the āweb-builderā apps (on or offline). Itās a bit like Affinity trying to take on Canva, Figma or Sketch. In fact the beauty of RW/Stacks for me, right now, is its state of chaos. Itās an environment that can be hacked and subverted and used in ways that were never intended, which makes it very creative (but also not āsimple to useā or āout of the boxā). What makes RW/Stacks powerful is the ability to make stacks. Every web-building app is going to provide access to CSS and HTML and maybe some JS in some form or another. Stacks, which is relatively light on the constraints it imposes, also allows integration of PHP scripts, React and Vue modules, rendering libraries like Three.js etc., and all the new stuff that browsers can do. Currently itās a great place to be integrating and building the tools one wants to use.
1 Like
And, FWIW, what I think Dan got wrong was trying to go head to head with Stacks with a rival add-on framework. There are thousands of stacks and zero elements. What would have been a killer for RW ā and I guess could still be if someone at Realmac is reading this ā would be to give people an easy framework for creating their own elements. A stack is just a template with an interface. A GUI interface builder linked to a smart templating system ā select, drag, drop, copy a variable across into a template, save, use ā that would really give RW an edge.
There isnāt really a Blocs aesthetic as such. What you often see could be more accurately described as a Bootstrap5 aesthetic or style. You often see this with Foundry built sites with the Bootstrap4 style. However, thatās just because many sites are built with the standard buttons, padding, margins or use the supplied Templates or pre configured blocs because they are so easy to work with. The opposite is somewhat true with RW + Stacks + Framework because you start off with a blank page and often add stacks from different developers all with different padding, etcā¦ You may remember the Apple site recreated in Blocs4 that ignited some discussion here and it was only Stuart who rose to the challenge with Source. I reckon with Blocs5 you can build anything now.
However, you can apply almost every single CSS function that you can think of, to every single Bloc and Bric using the same single graphical panel. Meaning that you only have to become familiar with one control panel, whereas every stack has a different settings layout. There is also a HTML/CSS Auto Complete Editor far better than the cramped RW one. Of course, you can just start with a blank page and make use of the Bootstrap variables and the Blocs5 colour global swatches - think Palette on steroids. Donāt think that Blocs5 is a drag and drop pre built layouts only tool. It can be that if you want that speed of build, and probably you could create a very proffessional fast well built site, in about 15 minutes.
With Blocs, if you add a Header to a page, Blocs adds nothing except 1 line of html. Contrast that with RW Stacks which adds a randomised name outer Div, a randomised named inner Div and a lot of duplicated CSS. The Blocs code is perfect for doing whatever you want with it and easier to deal with than RW in my experience. So you can hack and subvert it without all the additional baggage you have to work around and often battle with using RW.
2 Likes
One more cool new feature in Blocs5 Plus is called the Extractor.
As you build a page with Blocs5 Plus, you can extract the typography - font files, size, letter spacing, etc. in addition to colours and images, from another site, just by entering the URL for that site. The Typography for example, can then be live previewed in the Blocs page you are currently building and you can then import what you want. Fonts, Colours and images can be saved.
You can use this function to see what your page will look like using the exact same typography from any site.
7 Likes
Hey @Webdeersign thanks for all the kind words about Blocs 5. Itās good to see all of our hard work is getting some positive recognition outside the Blocs community.
š
6 Likes
Well, credit where credit is due and what you and the Blocs team have achieved is of a level that I have never seen in the web builder app communities before.
2 Likes
The only sad thing is, I just bought v4 Plus - not even 6 months ago.
Though I do not have buyer remorse, sadly sending 172.48 in less that one year is too much.
1 Like
Sometimes this happens. I am in the same boat. Mentally it can be a hit. However the feature list in the upgrade is well worth it. If you are using it for client work the difference is only an hour or so. Just my 2Ā¢
1 Like
This was not a complaintā¦
I have a policy not to double pay for any software within a given year.
3 Likes
Just a note that, Blocs 4 users get an upgrade discount of 30% off the list price of Blocs.
2 Likes
Blocs was my first option during the RW debacle. However, in the end it would mean needing to buy bricks (the equivalent of stacks) to gain much needed functionality.
I think you need to think long and hard before investing in a new system if youāve already invested heavily in your current one.
Iām currently using a completely different app for developing my websites. The new Stacks app may tempt me back as Iāve already purchased so many Stacks in the past, but thatās only a maybe. Iām enjoying not being reliant on RW+Stacks.
1 Like
Which App do you use now?
1 Like
As @Jannis kindly linked to, I am now using Pinegrow.
I have now managed to move a larger site to Pinegrow, which was my big test. This was a site that RW could only handle as two separate projects. Although there was a learning curve, this turned out relatively simple. Pinegrowās components (equivalent to RW partials) are excellent, as are master pages for keeping consistency and templating. Bootstrap 5 (no jquery) has more than enough blocks for just about any layout or items you might need that are drag and drop. Pinegrowās Unsplash integration means I need to process very few images and make the site very light. I also find that because all Pinegrow files are html, css, js and other web formats, I can use BB edit to search and replace the whole siteās code across all files rather than needing to open each stack and replace.
Iāve found that Pinegrow, Bootstrap 5, HTML5 and CSS3 cover all the functionality for which I used stacks. Plus, I must admit that Iām enjoying developing sites again!
1 Like
That makes good sense for choosing Pinegrow over RW (no Bootstrap5) but less sense when comparing with Blocs5 (with Bootstrap5.22 + CSS Grid).
Actually, using Unsplash integtration makes little sense and could be a recipe for many tears. E.g. the common use of 300dpi images and unpredictable changes in licensing;
I have used Pinegrow many times over the years and I would say it demands a deeper understanding of CSS and web layouts that the average RW or Blocs users does not have or has any interest in developing. However, if you are comfortable using Pinegrow you have made a leap where you are unlikely to go back to RW.
Pinegrow is powerful at a raw level, but I found that often the Pinegrow Community solution was to add a Wordpress component and turn the site into a Wordpress site. Debugging can make development slow depending on how ambitious your layouts are. The Blocs5 addon market is developing fast and for example the now mature Volt CMS (Blocs addon) brings drag and drop power to Blocs.
I was just looking at the Brics API for Blocs, and thatās where the difficulty starts for me. Blocs has a GUI interface builder, which is great compared to Stacks (where we have to build the interface by making entries in the plist), but it requires developers to write Javascript to activate every interface choice. And thatās the big difference: a stack is a template, not a code-module. In its simplest form, it lets us take an HTML structure and populate it with content. And itās that simplicity which makes stacks so powerful. We can take anything that someone might want to do over and over again and turn it into a stack ā whether thatās making lego-blocks of HTML and CSS, interacting with the server, or calling powerful JS routines. (This simplicity also explains why there are now 1000s of stacks ā Rapidweaver loads 1573 when I start it, and there are so many I donāt have ā and why there are currently only 63 brics).
Over the last couple of days Iāve been playing with chat.openai.com. While it raises lots of disturbing issues, it is also a game-changer here. For many of us, mastering the rudiments of HTML and CSS is not so difficult, but writing robust ā even just functional ā javascript is a big challenge. We can comb through Stacks Overflow for past answers, but often theyāre not exactly what we might be looking for (or written in JQuery, when weāre looking for plain JS). But with chat.openai.com you can ask: āgive me a vanilla javascript routine which moves a div on and off canvasā, and it does just that, explaining what itās doing in each line of the code in a clear, simple way that puts many tutorials to shame. And if you press āregenerateā, it comes up with another approach which seems just as well considered.
2 Likes
I think one of the developers who develop for both stacks and Blocs would be better placed to offer an insight into the writing/development differences. However, I donāt think the differences are as vast as you may think.
A major factor as to why there are less Brics, is very likely because Blocs does so much out of the box. Blocs users donāt need to purchase and install add-ons to: align buttons, manage fonts, use CSS Grid, edit images etc.
We only need Brics for the larger stuff like integration of a static CMS etc.
4 Likes